The Illusion of the Abyss

by Benjamin Rowe, copyright 1997

This piece was written for an English occult magazine. I
forget the title I originally put on it -- something cleverly
pompous.

The word "abyss" has seen widespread use in the
occult community, with many different meanings. In various times
and places it has been used to represent everything from the
Christian Hell to existential angst. In this century, among the
many occultists influenced by Aleister Crowley, the term has
taken on a specific reference to the process of transcendence,
the events by which a person's awareness transforms from an
individualized state into a transcendental or
"enlightened" state. Crowley called this process
"Crossing the Abyss".

Crowley's description of the process is highly dramatic and
equally idiosyncratic. It is also extremely vague, consisting of
a few symbols and metaphors that he used throughout his life,
without ever attempting to expand or explain them, or to explain
in detail the relationship between the transcendental and human
levels of being. Perhaps this vagueness is the reason for it
popularity; it provides a simple, easily-grasped image, however
mistaken it might be.

Crowley perceived the "Abyss" as a literal gap in
the stuff of creation, separating the human levels of existence
from the transcendental or divine levels. He describes this gap
as a region of nullity and terror, in which anything that enters
is torn asunder. (In this much, he was following a
long-established theme in Hebrew cabalistic lore.) In order to
attain to enlightenment, the magician must "leap" into
this Abyss, where his human self is ripped apart and destroyed.
If he has established enough momentum in his climb towards the
divine levels, then the divine spark in himself (freed from its
bindings to his human self) will be carried over to the other
side of the gap to become a Master of the Temple, the magickal
grade equivalent to the basic enlightened state.

Somewhere along the way from one side to the other, Crowley
says, the magician must also confront and temporarily become the
"Demon of the Abyss", whose nature is Dispersion.
Crowley named this demon Choronzon, a name for Satan from the
works of Dr. John Dee; but the characteristics he assigns to the
demon owe more to the "Dweller on the Threshold" from
Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni novels. It is
unclear how this confrontation relates to the destruction of the
magician's human self.

Crowley's description of his own "crossing of the
Abyss" is recorded in his book The Vision and
the Voice. The record conforms closely to his
metaphor of the process. However, his depiction disagrees in many
ways with those provided by other enlightened people across the
years; it also disagrees with my own experience of that process,
which was achieved through the same means Crowley used: John
Dee's "Enochian" magickal system, coupled with the
system of lore from the Western traditions of ceremonial magick
and the cabala.

From the perspective of my own experience, the whole
"Abyss" concept is nonsense. There is no gap between
the divine and human levels of existence; the transcendent being
is already constantly present and active in every person. Since
this is the case, there is nothing to "cross" or
"jump". The discontinuity, to the extent there is one,
is entirely a matter of perspective; the transcendent view is
dramatically different from the Self-centered view common to the
lower levels. But there is a constant connection and interaction
between the divine and the human; they make up a single,
undivided system.

Rather than a separation, our normal lack of awareness of the
divine aspect of ourselves is a matter of ignorance. Through
ignorance, reinforced by a lifetime of conditioning and habit --
and reinforced even more by magickal disciplines -- the
transcendent being in a person is deluded into believing it is
something that it is not: an individualized "self" or
"soul", operating in the mundane world through the
medium of a personality mask. In its ignorance, it becomes so
thoroughly identified with this self (which is a constructed
thing) that it becomes unaware that it is anything other than
that self. You might think of it as a weird sort of dharana or
deep meditation; a concentration on an object of meditation (the
self, in this case) so intent that the difference between the
perceiver and the perceived disappears.

Achieving transcendence therefore is not a matter of creating
a bridge over a gap, or of leaping a gap, or anything of that
sort. Rather, it is a matter of awakening the already-present
transcendent being from its state of identification with the
self, getting it to realize and act from its natural state.

What it takes to do this can vary widely. It might require
something a catastrophic as the complete destruction of the
"self", as in the typical Abyss myth; but it could
equally be as subtle and gentle as a breath of air slipping out
through an open window, leaving the self completely intact. In my
own case, it was somewhere between these extremes. There were
some long and rather painful steps leading up to it, but the
final event was quick, undramatic, and utterly simple.

To put the event in context, there are two main thrusts to the
magickal/cabalistic approach to initiation. First, through
invocations, astral explorations, meditation, etc., it seeks to
open up the hidden portions of the mind (both sub- and
superconscious), to bring their activity under conscious
direction, and to make use of them to explore and perceive the
corresponding aspects of the universe at large. The scope and
control exercised by the individual is constantly increased, and
the various parts brought into a state of tight coordination.

At the same time, the cabalistic side of the work seeks to
bring about an ever-increasing synthesis in the _contents_ of the
mind. Through the use of correspondences, the chaos of raw
experience is gradually reduced. Ideas and experiences get
organized into hierarchies, each level abstracting something from
the lower ones, so that ever-greater numbers of events become
instances of ever-simpler ideas. Eventually things coordinate
into an elegant system of archetypes, energies, and
relationships.

By the time the person has achieved and absorbed the highest
purely human level and become an "Exempt Adept", both
these processes have pretty much been exhausted. Those parts of
the person's being that are capable of being controlled and
coordinated by the individual self are as integrated as they are
ever going to be. The contents of the mind have been reduced to
an integrated scheme and an encompassing philosophy. He is the
Compleat Individual, so to speak. Such people -- as Crowley notes
-- tend to become leaders of "schools of thought" for
spreading their philosophy; or they become priests or social
leaders of some sort.

Crowley talks about the next stage of the process as if it
were something to be consciously decided; but in fact, if it
happens out of anything except necessity, the person is probably
jumping the gun. (I should note that the description that follows
is from my own experience, coordinated with a very few other
people's; your mileage may vary. And this applies only
to the magickal/cabalistic approach; it doesn't seem to occur --
at least not with the same severity -- in the more mystical
approaches of the Eastern systems.)

The Exempt Adept now enters into a period of increasing
"dryness", what I call "wandering in the
wasteland", following the myth of the Grail Knights . I
don't know how this associates with the so-called "dark
night of the soul" -- descriptions of that never resonate
for me. He has reached a point of diminishing returns in both his
magickal and cabalistic endeavors.

His magickal work still raises his consciousness above its
normal level; but instead of staying at that higher level, he
always seems to fall back to the point where he started, or
advances only the most minute increment -- far too little for the
amount of effort expended. And such advances as he makes
eventually turn out to be only variations on what he has already
accomplished, not something truly new. There seems to be some
sort of asymptotic principle in effect. Each increment he moves
above his current level requires substantially larger amounts of
effort; he can expend all the energy at his command without
getting to a stable higher level.

A similar state exists with respect to his cabalistic work. He
continues to make elaborations on his synthetic scheme, but finds
that new additions and expansions decrease in frequency. At the
same time he becomes aware that there are aspects of existence
that cannot be fit into his present scheme without destroying it
utterly and starting over from scratch; he doesn't know what
these aspects are, exactly, but he can sense them looming over
the horizon.

And his finely coordinated Self seems to be spinning its
wheels in most of its endeavors. He can still act out the
functions of the Exempt Adept, but gets less pleasure and
fulfillment out of doing so. He can't get a grip on things, on a
way to use this great Self of his; he feels like he is trying to
act in a frictionless environment.

The reason for all this is that the Adept is looking for
something that isn't there -- that is, a continuation of the path
as he has experienced it so far, with its blinding revelations,
ecstatic highs, encompassing archetypes, etc. There just isn't
any more of that, above his current level; such things are
characteristic of the human-accessible magickal realms, not the
transcendent realms. But he doesn't know that.

Needless to say, the Adept in this situation is a pretty
miserable character. Not all the time; usually he can go about
his business in the character of the Adept without any
difficulty. But periodically the futility of it all hits, and the
despair and desperation can reach incredible levels of intensity.
What he wants, more than anything, is to get OUT, without seeing
any way of doing so. Like the mythical Christ on his cross, he
calls out to his god, and gets no answer. All he can do is suffer
alone.

But even despair has its limits; when nothing one does can
have any effect on the situation, one eventually just gives it
up. He gets beyond hope of anything happening, beyond despair
that nothing is happening, and just lives life as it comes,
without any particular plans or expectations, without any desire
beyond the moment. He goes on because that is what he does, and
for no purpose. This whole process can go on for a long time. In
my own case, the period of increasing despair lasted over five
years, the period of "just living" lasted another five.

The actual awakening of transcendent being seems an anticlimax
after the wasteland period. Even now, four years after the fact,
I am uncertain exactly what triggered the moment when it awoke.
All I recall is that some chance remark by a person in an online
discussion group caused me to make an assessment, and the being
noted that it was no longer identical with the self, but was
aware without dependence upon the facilities of the
individualized "soul". It was now the no-thing-ness of
Binah, instead of identifying with the differentiated activities
of the lower spheres. It could put the self on, like a set of
clothes, and off again at will.

What happened then is another story. But a few things to note:

-- Despite being very unpleasant, there was no destruction of
the individualized self involved; the transcendent being simply
"stepped out" of it, leaving it more or less intact,
for the moment. A rather substantial re-orientation of it took
place later, but it was still undamaged.

-- There was no "jumping into the Abyss"; in fact,
no Abyss as such.

-- There was no confrontation with the Demon Choronzon, or any
other supposed "denizen" of the "Abyss". No
apparently external horrors of any sort, not even Chthulhu.

-- No particular invocations were involved in triggering the
event. It took place during an hiatus in my Enochian work, and
that work was directed to other purposes in any case.